Gunther Peck

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About Gunther

Peck's research focuses on the long history of human trafficking and its relationship to the evolution of racial ideology, humanitarian intervention, and immigration policy in North America and Europe.

Publications

Locates conceptual starting points for linking migrant workers and global commons by analyzing the work of the transnational and the commons in political conversation at the WSF and in the historiographies of immigration and the environment in North America.

Explores how padrones such as Leon Skliris used hallmarks of "free" labor relations -- the wage contract and the right to quit -- to create an expansive system of coercive labor relations in the North American West between 1885 and 1925.

Discusses geographies of labor, which elucidate not only how nonhuman nature and human work have historically become alienated, but also how they have inspired mutually defining visions of redeemed nature and labor, from the 1830s to the present.

Explores the analytical advantages of linking migrant workers to global commons. Locates the conceptual starting points for linking migrant workers and global commons by analyzing the work of the transnational and the commons in political conversation and in th historiographies of immigration and the environment in North America.

Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1885-1930 (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Argues that padrones were not primitive men but rather thoroughly modern entrepreneurs who used corporations, the labor contract, and the right to quit to create far-flung networks. Analyzes how immigrant workers emancipated themselves using the tools of padrone power to their own advantage.